Making of "I Wish"

This happened the other day while I was tucking 6yo into bed.  He clapped back with "-but YOU have loads of toys!".  I prefer to make a gag visual, so I set the comic in Fran's office and had Vincent give her a withering look.

I added a step to the animation above where I bring in my "paper dolls".  I do this every time, but I never thought to screenshot it.  I have a character sheet with emotionless outlines which I place over the rough pencils.  I chop them up and move the body bits around to create a guide for my neat pencils.  It keeps the characters in proportion with each other, as well as anatomy semi consistent.  I would be absolutely appalling at keeping on model without them, although sometimes I do long for a more "stretchy" freehand drawing style, which this does limit.

I experimented with different poses in the top panels.  I wanted Fran's eyes closed so she only realizes her mistake once open, but combined with the hands together, it looked like she was praying.  I went back to my first instinct of the raised pointer.  Whenever possible, I like to have as much difference between the panel poses as possible, so now she had her hand raised, I changed Vince to have his down.  This adds some visual interest and makes things seem more animated and natural.

The toys took a while to draw.  They are all mine except for the 3 horror POPs and the Starship Enterprise.  This is a nod to how her and I are slightly different.  I do enjoy all these things, but her passion is writing Sci-Fi horror novels.  This has never come up in the comics before, but it will come into play if we ever get a TV show.

For every punchline I ask myself what needs to come first for maximum "punch" -the words or the image.  I'd decided the words should come first on this one and placed the speech bubble accordingly.  It wasn't until I'd colored it that I realized I'd made a mistake.  The speech bubble was getting lost in the shelves, I had an ugly looking gap by Vincent AND actually, perhaps it was funnier to have the reader reach the conclusion just before she did.  I moved the speech bubble, which was a huge pain in the ass because I had to draw in all the toys behind it.  I'm glad I did though, it would have bugged me!